The password protection available with MobileMe is somewhat limited in the the whole site is protected. When you publish to a “real” server you can password protect any folder(s) or directory. There are two methods...

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Password Protection, Comments, Search & Hit Counter

For those of you are being forced to switch from MobileMe - and those who want the features of course - here’s some alternatives to the iWeb features that are unique to the Apple server.

[1] Using the WebShell Wizard

Many hosting services such as Host Excellence use WebShell as the file manager. This application has a wizard that makes it really easy to password protect any folder or directory for any number of users. Selecting the folder that needs protected and clicking the “Protect” button will launch the wizard and then its just a question of entering the username(s) and password(s) to create the protect file and add the info. Adding more users can be done at any time.

[2] .htaccess

if your hosting service doesn’t have WebShell you can achieve the same thing by creating an .htaccess file and adding the info to it. This is not so straight forward but you can get help by using an online generator. Using this method you can also protect individual files.

Blog, Photo and General Comments.

Allowing visitors to leave comments on your blog and photo pages can be extended to any page using the methods below.

Allowing visitors to leave comments on your blog and photo pages can be extended to any page using the methods listed below.

[1] Disqus - I chose to use Disqus because it has both free and paid versions and its future seems fairly as some major league websites have adopted it.

The step by step instructions include a download link for the necessary files and code. The tutorial covers two methods of installing comments and how to easily make any comments box unique to that page.

[3] Echo is a flash widget which is fairly expensive but really easy to use. I didn’t consider this as an option because of the fact that iOS devices such as the iPhone don’t support flash and its future is uncertain.

Search function

Adding a search box to a website is easy and you can see an example at the bottom of this page.

The search function obviously depends on the fact that the content has been crawled and indexed by the search engines - in this case Google.

Logically, the instructions for creating a search box and a website map are included in the Search Engine Optimization ebook.

Hit Counter

The iWeb hit counter is kind of funky and cannot be reset if required. Some alternatives are described HERE.

Hit counters that appear on the web page are fairly useless anyway and analytics such as those provided by Google and Statcounter are way beyond the needs of the average person.

I prefer to use the Webalizer that comes with a Host Excellence account. This is automatically generated in every website root folder and you can quickly view the stats online. The bar chart allows you to quickly compare monthly performance and the table summary gives me all the info I need.

A lot more detailed info is available if you drill down through all the folders using the menu shown below.

Click HERE to see an example of a Comments page with a button to view it in a separate window.

The Search Engine Optimization EBook covers all the necessary steps for signing up for website hosting, registering a domain name, publishing and uploading the files via FTP, search engine optimizing, preparing the files for faster download and lots more. There’s also a download link to the cheat sheet for listing all the info required.

The How To Build a Custom Website Ebook also covers FTP and how to prepare and upload other files such as PDFs, Music and Video files and the assets required for website media players. Step by step instructions for enabling website comments, contact form, password protection, search function and statistics.